it hurts to be human

You know, there are so many times that though I am a Christian, all of the belief in the world can't settle the angst in my soul. Maybe if I were a better follower of Christ, I would have more peace, but I suspect that every human being feels this way sometimes. I regret things, overanalyze things, and sometimes (worst of all) feel this steady uneasiness in the pit of my stomach...the kind of unease that I cannot quite put my finger on. And I wonder what I am feeling and why.

Maybe it is the accumulated total of the pain of being human. The pain of natural disasters assaulting our earth. The pain of having three parishoners die in the past month and seeing their gray bodies lying in the death bed, the coffin. The pain of struggling with my own inner battles. The pain of knowing love is a risk....and loss and death is inevitable. There is no question about it. It hurts to be human.

I am preparing a confirmation lesson about Jesus, the center of our faith. As I study up for it, I find myself finding hard to push through to His relevance in the dank battles I so often face...and then it hits me...if to be human is to know pain, then Jesus knows exactly what I'm talking about. Didn't He struggle in the desert with temptation? Didn't He struggle so intensely in Gethsamane that He sweat drops of blood? Didn't He weep at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend? Didn't He die on a cross, suffering one of the most intense and abusive forms of execution that human beings have devised? And yet...He didn't have to do any of this. He did it for me, for you...because He chose to...